Western science led to the invention of gunpowder and other superior military weapons that outclassed bows, arrows and spears.
If, that is, anyone still wants a whiff of the gunpowder and sawdust in the rheumaticky old mother of parliaments.
The cellars will be scouted for gunpowder, the Queen will rock up in a gilded coach, and then Black Rod will tap.
If that is right, more is at stake in the Dutch courtroom than Bolivia's hankering for beachfront property.The struggle has its origin in the exploitation of nitrates, used for fertiliser and to make saltpetre for the manufacture of gunpowder, in the Bolivian littoral, whose sparse population was mainly Chilean.
So America had its "gunpowder plot"; and the nun was pretty (and was later to discard her wimple and marry one of the priests).
The inevitable happened in 1995, when a scholar from a university in Lanzhou in north-western China claimed that, like the printing press, gunpowder, filial piety and slimming soap, golf was a Chinese invention.
The ancient Babylonians had developed complex mathematical techniques to record the stars, the Greeks systemised the organisation of knowledge based on logic, Islamic scholars wrote astronomical and medical texts and Chinese inventors recorded recipes for gunpowder.
The prosecution's case has been hampered by its failure to gather sufficient forensic evidence such as testing for gunpowder on the policemen's hands—after the shootings.
"We're sitting on a keg of gunpowder," says Nasir El-Rufai, a former federal minister.
THROUGHOUT history new technologies have revolutionised warfare, sometimes abruptly, sometimes only gradually: think of the chariot, gunpowder, aircraft, radar and nuclear fission.
It is, he says, as though international oil firms got together once a year to present awards to avant-garde artists who paint in crude.In this section The sweet smell of gunpowder Beware!
